she said, pulling the hood of her Tyvek paper suit over her long black hair. ‘Where is DI Fletcher? OK, I hope?’
‘He’s gone with the boy to the hospital until we can locate the boy’s parents. From what information we got out of those drunken friends of his, the mother’s a lush and the father’s not much better. We’re having trouble finding them.’
They walked under the police tape and towards the incident tent. Danika pulled on a pair of overshoes, then thin blue plastic gloves, and followed Claire inside the tent. She was careful not to disturb any potential evidence, keeping to the plastic walkway which led towards the body. She squinted under the glare of the large spotlights, one in each of the four corners of the tent.
Both women looked down at the body. The face of a young girl stared back at them. Her body was naked, with a thick chain around her ankles. Danika stared at the heavy coiled links.
‘Someone weighted her down,’ she said, kneeling next to the body. Her eyes glanced over the girl’s face and down to her toes. Then she returned to the deep cut to the side of the neck. The remains of dried blood were partially spattered down the dead woman’s neck and chest, still visible despite having been in the lake. The water had given the blood a dull hue against the skin.
‘How long do you think she’s been under the ice?’ Claire said.
‘It’s hard to say at this stage. When someone has been in cold storage, it slows the process of decomposition. It will be hard to pinpoint a time of death.’
‘She’s not been in a fridge, Danika.’
‘Yes, but being under the ice has had the same effect to some degree. If she had been found elsewhere, there would be larvae, maggots… I could pinpoint the time period. There are no obvious signs of scavengers having tampered with the body, although I’ll know more when I’ve examined her properly, but it suggests maybe she’s not been in the water very long.
‘There’s a little orange tinge to the skin, which is to be expected as she’s been submerged, but it’s minimal. Again this would indicate she’s not been here long.’ She paused, frowning hard. ‘That chain’s a bit excessive. Even with it weighting her down, she’d have risen to the surface eventually, but you were lucky to find her now before the skin started to peel.’
Danika looked up. ‘It’s looking likely loss of blood is the cause of death.’ Claire cocked her head, looking at the body at a new angle as Danika continued. ‘She has a deep laceration to the side of the neck, most likely severing a jugular vein, carotid artery and the trachea. Death would have occurred within seconds, but she was probably killed somewhere else and dumped in the lake.’
‘Ensuring most of the evidence is washed away.’ Claire’s voice was stern. Danika nodded in agreement.
‘That’s why there isn’t as much blood here as there should be.’ She pulled herself up and snapped a glove off over her hand. ‘Wherever your crime scene is, it would’ve been a bloodbath.’
‘The blood would’ve been cleared up.’
‘Yes, but with the best will in the world it would be practically impossible to clear every last drop of it. There’ll be a scrap or fine trace of it left somewhere. It’s your job to find it.’
Detective Sergeant Elias Crest rolled the biro he’d been chewing over his teeth, staring blankly at the newspaper on the table in front of him.
He’d been in Haverbridge CID less than a week and still he felt on edge. Moving back down south after living in Liverpool for the best part of eight years – five spent in CID – it was taking him time to adjust to his new surroundings.
It would take him even longer to adjust to working under yet another female DCI. His old Guv, DCI Meredith Glass, had been tough but she at least gave him the benefit of the doubt.
DCI Winters however… He chewed his bottom lip as he cast his mind back to his first morning. She’d shaken his hand, but gripped it tight. He’d wondered if that had been her way of asserting her authority without the need for words to be spoken.
He knew she would have seen his file. Seen the reason he was transferring. Not that he gave a shit about what she thought in that respect but still, it bothered him. He didn’t want her to have something she could hold over him, something she could use as leverage if she wanted.
Meredith Glass had tried that once.
He had smiled at Claire, in a vain attempt to hide his reservations. He’d asked her to call him by his first name, when she’d addressed him merely as ‘Crest’, but it had the opposite of the desired effect.
Her grip had tightened around his hand further, her face dropping any hint of a smile she may have expressed.
‘I try to make it a habit never to go by first names, Crest,’ she had said. He remembered how she’d given him the once over, head to toe, without any subtlety.
‘To you, I’m “Ma’am”, “Guv”, “Boss”… Yes?’ she’d said.
Elias had remained silent. ‘And “Bitch”?’ he’d thought, suppressing a wry smile.
He remembered feeling a boiling heat rise up inside him as she had explained what was expected of him.
‘You’ll be mainly under the supervision of DI Fletcher, a very competent and respected member of my team,’ she had said, watching his face carefully.
Elias had kept his eyes focused ahead. He knew when to pick his fights and when to merely observe.
And what was that last part she’d said? Something that had made him question what he was doing here. He grimaced as he remembered, her words echoing inside his head.
‘I have no time for men who find it hard to work under the authority of a woman.’
She had deliberately let that sentence hang there in silence a moment longer than she’d needed to.
Elias figured he’d deserved that. Still, his eyes narrowed, the memory fresh in his mind, eating away at him.
I wish I knew exactly what was in my file.
Then there had been that parting shot – ‘I won’t tolerate mavericks.’
It was these words that jolted him out of his reverie, back to the lunch room.
He eyed the few people that were gathered around the vending machine, and plucked the biro from his mouth, flicking it across the table with irritation.
He’d decided to sit on his own. He wasn’t in the mood for making friends. He’d had friends before he transferred, or so he thought. Where had they been when he needed someone to cover his arse? Watching their own backs, that’s where. Doing everything by the book. Sometimes rules had to be broken for the greater good.
He tried to push the thought from his mind, staring down at his lunch, but although the hot meal smelled delicious, he didn’t feel very hungry. Instead he added five heaped teaspoons of sugar to his coffee cup and slowly began to stir. He barely noticed DI David Matthews as
